The Survivors

by Will Weaver

  Just before the game starts, Sarah looks over her shoulder and down. Something just made her look. Ray is staring up at her. His earbuds are in, but he’s focused on her.

  He waves.

  She swallows, then discreetly lifts her chin.

  He is holding two bags of popcorn, one of which he holds up to her.

  Sarah turns quickly back to the other girls.

  “What?” Mackenzie asks. She has major radar.

  “Nothing.” Sarah sits for a moment. “Actually, are the bathrooms down there?”

  “Somebody go with Sarah and show her the can,” Mackenzie says, and there is laughter.

  “I will, I will,” chirp a couple of voices, including Rachel’s.

  “No—you’ll miss the kickoff. I can find it myself.” With that, Sarah trots down the metal steps just as the national anthem starts: perfect timing, as none of the girls get up and follow her.

  Behind the grandstand bleachers, Ray is nowhere to be seen. Which is fine, because Rachel, hand over her heart and singing the anthem, is looking over her shoulder and down at Sarah.

  Sarah waves and continues toward the concession stand and restroom building.

  Ray is leaning against a large wooden post, waiting for her. His ever-present sketch pad is tucked behind his belt; a pencil point pokes out of the dark hair over his right ear. From behind his back, he whips out two little brown bags and holds out one to her. “Popcorn?”

  “Maybe,” Sarah says. “Though how do I know it doesn’t have some sort of date drug?”

  Ray grins. “Here’s mine; we’ll switch.”

  “That old switch-the-popcorn-bag trick,” Sarah says as she takes his.

  They stand munching their popcorn like crazy so they don’t have to talk.

  “So where are all your friends tonight?” Sarah asks.

  Ray shrugs. “They’re not big football fans.”

  “So what brings you here?”

  “Well. To be honest …” Suddenly Ray gags—then coughs and expels a white bullet of popcorn. “Jeez, sorry!” He covers his mouth, and his face reddens.

  “The old choke-on-the-popcorn trick,” Sarah says.

  Ray’s dark eyes shine; they make Sarah’s face feel warm.

  “No kilt tonight?” She glances down at his jeans.

  “It gets cold later,” Ray says, “if you know what I mean.”

  “Let’s not go there,” Sarah says. It’s her turn to grin stupidly and look away.

  “Actually, I wear the kilt just to annoy Mr. James, the school principal. Drives him crazy.”

  “How so?”

  “Enforcing the school dress codes is his life’s ambition. He called me in right away the first day of school about my kilt and threatened to send me home. But I was way ahead of him—I had the papers,” Ray says.

  “Papers?”

  “If you have a Scottish family name, there’s a particular plaid that belongs to your clan. I had the list that proved it, so he had to let me go. But he was steamed, let me tell you.”

  Sarah glances over her shoulder toward the bleachers. Rays starts munching popcorn again. “So tell me about your family,” she says.

  “Pretty generic,” Ray says. “One older brother. My mom’s an artist—which is sort of where I got hooked on drawing, I guess—and my dad’s a nurse at the hospital. I work there, too, about twenty hours a week.”

  “So you’re an artist and a doctor?” Sarah teases.

  “I wish. My dad got me a janitor’s job. I’m one of the swing-shift guys who do floors. What about your family?”

  She gives him the short version: transfer student on open enrollment, her family’s summer place “on the lake,” a phrase that everybody in Minnesota understands. “My mom’s an editor and a literary agent, and my dad’s a musician,” she says.

  “A musician? Cool,” Ray says.

  “Sort of a musician,” she says quickly. “More like wants to be a musician. Someday.”

  “What does he play?”

  She hesitates a second. “Piano,” she says.

  Ray nods. “My mom’s a sculptor. She makes these wild things out of found material. She won’t use anything new—it has to be thrown-away stuff.”

  “Cool,” Sarah says.

  They’re standing really close now.

  “I’d better get back,” Sarah says.

  The skin on Ray’s forehead bunches. “Before you do, tell me again why you hang out with Mackenzie?”

  “Why do you hang out with your friends?” she replies.

  “Mackenzie’s not your friend. The only friend Mackenzie has is Mackenzie.”

  “I’ve gotta go. Really.”

  “See you in school?” Ray says.

  “I guess.”

  “What I meant was will you talk to me in school?”

  “Sure,” Sarah says evasively.

  “No, I mean talk talk. Like we are now.”

  “Sure. That is, if I have no aftereffects from the popcorn you gave me.” They hug briefly, clumsily, and then Sarah hurries away.

  Back in the bleachers, Mackenzie is overly focused on the game.

  “There goes Django!” Rachel says as a receiver races for a pass—and gathers it in. The crowd cheers. Django breaks loose for a few yards but is tackled; he goes down in a pile of players and a faint cloud of dust.

  “What’s the score?” Sarah says brightly.

  Mackenzie is silent. Then she turns to Sarah. “Were you talking to that creepy Ray?”

  Sarah clears her throat. “Yeah. Sort of. We were both getting some popcorn, so, you know, it’s not like I could avoid him.”

  “Right,” Mackenzie says flatly. Her eyes turn back to the game.

  “Want some?” Sarah asks, holding out the bag.

  Mackenzie ignores the popcorn. “Ray O’Keefe is from this really crazy family. They live in this little house right in town. His dad bikes everywhere, even in winter, and his mom is this old hippie or something. They’re, like, totally poor.”

  Back at Mackenzie’s house they get ready for bed. Mackenzie’s room is nearly half the size of the cabin and has its own bathroom. Mackenzie and Rachel go in to brush their teeth, and Sarah goes to wash in the hall bathroom. She takes her time, washing her face and then running the warm water over her hands for a few extra minutes, savoring the luxury of indoor plumbing. Of hot water.

  Heading back to Mackenzie’s room, she pauses in the hallway before a wall full of family photographs, all framed. Mackenzie’s brothers in their letter jackets. Mackenzie with her tennis racket. The entire family posed together in the backyard, smiling and happy. All the pictures look so … normal. So BV.

  When Sarah returns to the bedroom, Mackenzie and Rachel are sprawled on the queen-size bed poring over their sixth-grade yearbook. “Come on, Sarah,” Mackenzie says. “This will be very educational for you.” Rachel giggles. Mackenzie starts flipping pages and pointing to pictures; her mood has improved.

  “That’s Dylan,” she says, pointing to a skinny boy with his hair in his eyes. “He was a total loser last year; but he sits behind me in algebra this year, and I noticed that he got cute over the summer.”

  “I always thought he was cute,” says Rachel, staring at the picture.

  “Really, Rachel,” Mackenzie says. “You have such low expectations.”

  “And there’s Kara Lindberg,” Rachel says. “Remember her?”

  “Ick,” Mackenzie says with a shudder. “She and her family came here last fall from Colorado. Her parents lost their jobs after the volcanoes and then their house was foreclosed on, so they had to move.”

  “That’s horrible,” Sarah says quickly.

  Mackenzie shrugs. “They were camping in the state park here. She had to shower in the school locker room.”

  “No way!” Sarah says, as if that was totally disgusting.

  “Definitely a Traveler,” Rachel says. “And we could tell anyway, because Traveler kids always tried to charge their cell phones at school.”


  “Remember how Sharelle ‘accidentally’ stepped on Kara’s phone and smashed it?” Mackenzie says.

  Rachel laughs wildly.

  Mackenzie wrinkles her nose. “Anyway, there were lots of icky homeless people from the cities who just showed up thinking they could freeload on all of us who actually live here. I’m really glad they passed that law so they all had to leave.”

  “Me, too,” Rachael says. “Most of them smelled funny.”

  “They should never have put Kara in the yearbook,” Mackenzie says.

  “For sure not!” Rachel says.

  Sarah fakes a yawn. “I’m tired,” she says, flopping onto her sleeping bag.

  “Me, too,” Mackenzie says. “And I have a tennis lesson in the morning.” She flicks the light switch as the girls snuggle down under comforters and into sleeping bags. They giggle for a while longer about Dylan and Django and other cute boys and then, slowly, the room grows quiet. Eventually Sarah hears Mackenzie’s deep, rhythmic breathing and Rachel’s tiny snoring sounds. But she is wide-awake.

  Icky homeless people. That would pretty much be her.

  CHAPTER TEN

  MILES

  ON SATURDAY MILES TAKES HIS mother to town on his Kawasaki motorbike. It’s his second trip; he had to pick up Sarah from her stupid sleepover. For some reason he wasn’t supposed to arrive at the Phelps house, so they met downtown. But Saturdays are good for riding. There are more people around that day—the grocery stores are busier, and there’s more traffic—which makes it easier to blend in with the locals.

  “We’ll get groceries on the way home,” Miles says over his shoulder and through his bandana.

  “Okay,” his mother says, her voice muffled against his back. She hangs on for dear life; Miles knows that she hates the dirt bike, but she’s a businesswoman and not dumb. The bike is the perfect solution for now: It gets close to a hundred miles to a gallon of gas and has knobby, off-road tires for escaping into the woods if needed. A dirt bike and a gun: two things he never would have owned back in the suburbs.

  On the highway, the bike leaves a dark stripe in the pale ash. Pumice dust rolls up behind them like a contrail of jet exhaust in the sky. He can only see gray in the little rearview mirror—not that there is much traffic to worry about. Soon the nose of a pickup grows in the oval glass of his mirror, and its rumbling V-8 comes on fast. Miles veers onto the shoulder to let it pass. When the truck streams by, the highway in front is gone—lost in a rolling, gray dust cloud. Disorientation hits—like a pilot losing which way is up—and he concentrates on keeping his handlebars straight. When the air doesn’t clear, he looks straight down beside his right boot and picks up the seam where the shoulder meets the main highway. A line, somewhere between gray and brown—enough to keep them on the road—unwinds ahead. Gradually the wider highway returns to view. Behind, his mother coughs and presses her head tighter against his back.

  He takes the back route into town, passing the high school and the entrance to a juvenile lockup. He goes over a railroad crossing and up a grade to the traffic light by the post office, where they pick up their mail once a week.

  PLEASE REMOVE DUST MASKS AT THE DOOR, a sign reads. Miles waits on the motorbike while his mother goes in. She’s out in two minutes, thumbing through a handful of letters and clutching a couple of packages—book manuscripts probably—under her other arm.

  “Let’s roll,” Miles says. “You can look at that stuff later.”

  “‘That stuff’ is how we make a living, thank you very much,” his mother says.

  “How you do that is a mystery to me,” Miles says as he stashes her mail in the right-side saddlebag. His mother playfully squeezes his rib cage as they motor off. It’s one more thing they would never have done in the burbs: get his mother to ride on the back of a dirt bike.

  The next stop is the library, a modern, one-story building with outthrust roof angles where Nat does her e-mail and internet thing once a week, plus charges Artie’s iPod.

  “See you here later,” she says.

  Miles nods, then chains the Kawasaki to a bike rack, after which he walks over to the Alternative Education Center. It’s a low brick building open on Saturdays, which only makes sense. And that’s what he likes about the AEC—there are no bells. No principals.

  Inside the waiting area the old couch is occupied by two girls, one with a lot of piercings and raccoon-style black eye makeup, the other with a real baby under a small blanket. “Hey,” Miles says.

  The young mom smiles tiredly. She’s about Miles’s age and pretty in a skinny, pale kind of way; it’s as if all of her physical powers went into her baby, which makes smacking and sucking noises under the blanket. As she shifts the baby, the white top of one breast curves upward. Miles quickly looks away (the dark-eyed chick gives him a disgusted look). Carrying his packet, he slides past her to the check-in desk.

  “Mr. L in?” he asks.

  “Sure am!” a man’s voice calls from a cubicle just beyond. A head pops up, bald on top but with a thin gray ponytail behind. “Be with you in a few minutes, Miles.”

  The teachers here are cooler than at regular school, too, ones such as Mr. Lewandowski, who didn’t fit into public school—“The Machine,” as Mr. L called it.

  Rather than hang with the girls in the lobby, Miles heads to the bathroom, where he takes a long time on the toilet. Afterward he spends time at the sink washing up all over, including his armpits, which were, he has to admit, a tiny bit rank. Clean, he reemerges, ready for a second chance with the girls on the couch. The young mom and her baby are gone, but the pierced girl glares at him as if daring him to say something. He sits down anyway. Looks through a gummy magazine.

  “I hate this,” the girl says suddenly.

  “What is this?” Miles asks pleasantly.

  “Everything,” she mutters.

  “Let’s turn that frown upside down!” Miles says. It’s supposed to come out funny—a parody of an overly cheerful host on a kids’ television show—but it clanks.

  The girl stares at him. “Are you insane?”

  “Ah, I don’t think so,” Miles says. “But you never know.”

  That clanks, too. The girl crosses her arms across her chest and looks out the window. Miles is trying to think of something not insane to say when Mr. Lewandowski calls his name.

  “Sorry, got to go,” he says to the pierced girl.

  She does not reply.

  “So, how are things?” Mr. Lewandowski asks. They shake hands, and Miles sits down.

  “No problems, really,” Miles says.

  Mr. Lewandowski leans back in a creaky chair. “Your stuff is all good—math especially.”

  “Thanks.”

  They take a few minutes and go through his packet, after which Mr. Lewandowski hands Miles the next one. This school proceeds at the student’s pace; and since Miles is all caught up, they have time to BS about the state of the world. “I try to remain optimistic,” Mr. L says as he kicks back, “because, hey, what’s the alternative?” He laughs.

  It takes Miles a second to get the joke.

  Back at the library, Miles finds that his mother is still waiting for a computer terminal. She holds up her hands and shrugs, so he skulks along the magazine shelves. He picks up a Fun FAQs About Volcanoes sheet that has been scrawled upon and defaced. It’s good to see that some kids—by the looks of the handwriting—are on guard against stupidity. He glances around the library but sees only adults and little stumblers plus a couple of crying babies.

  He scores a well-thumbed Popular Mechanics. He reads and people watches over the top of his magazine. The library patrons have some rough edges; their clothes smell like dogs and wood smoke. A mother and her three squirming kids check out a stack of DVDs. The bestseller display is picked mostly clean. Audio books are mostly gone, too. In the far corner there’s a big-screen television in a small room, with headsets for listening. On the silent screen, a rolling banner beneath two talking heads reads “Climat
e conditions improving: full summer growing season predicted.” Right. That’s what they said at the beginning of the summer, and barely a seed sprouted. If adults obsessed about the weather before the volcanoes, now the weather report is the only topic. Miles is tempted to listen, but the television room is crowded and warm, and anyway, he has given up on television. There’s no good news, and if there is, who knows if it’s true?

  A fat woman gets up from a computer terminal. The librarian calls out, “Natalie?”

  His mother hands Miles her purse and the mail for safekeeping, and takes a seat at computer station number four.

  The woman librarian glances at the sign-up sheet. “It’s Natalie—?” she asks. She wants a last name.

  “Just Natalie,” Miles’s mother says cheerfully, and turns to her work.

  The librarian pauses, then moves on. Computer terminals have a one-hour limit, and his mother is just getting up to speed—she types faster than a woodpecker pecks—when the reference librarian returns with the clipboard.

  “Excuse me,” the librarian says to Nat.

  Miles lowers his magazine.

  “Yes?” Nat asks. There’s annoyance in her voice.

  “Do you have some form of identification?” the woman asks.

  Nat is silent. People turn to stare. “I’m sorry, say again?” Miles’s mother asks the librarian.

  “ID,” the librarian repeats. “A driver’s license. Something.”

  “And why would I need that?” Nat asks, still keeping her smile, though it has slipped big-time. “I come here all the time.”

  “We have … orders. Instructions to serve our local community first. If you live outside of Beltrami County—if you’re traveling through—you’ll have to give up the terminal if there are local people waiting.”